Editorial: Congress missed a great opportunity

There is little to be cheerful about in the congressional approval of a deal that stops some tax increases but does nothing to cut spending, which is the real culprit causing the nation’s disgraceful $16-trillion debt.

Bipartisan observers agree that a combination of tax increases and spending cuts adding up to $4 trillion would have been necessary for a credible down payment on the debt over the next 10 years. This week’s deal amounted to $600 billion — virtually all in taxes — with all signs pointing to plans to spend, not save, that money.

Especially disappointing was that U.S. Rep. Mike Rogers was among a minority of House Republicans supporting the deal. His district includes much of northern Oakland County. Rogers has posed as a champion of tea party government economizers. Perhaps his vote supporting the deal was the price of a leadership position. He is chairman of the House Intelligence Committee.

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Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson, co-chairmen of the national Campaign to Fix the Debt, said the deal was “truly a missed opportunity to do something big to reduce our long-term fiscal problems.” Bowles, a Democrat, and Simpson, a Republican, headed the president’s National Commission on the Debt that issued a report outlining common-sense tax and budget actions to reduce the debt.

“Washington missed this magic moment to do something big to reduce the deficit, reform our tax code and fix our entitlement programs,” Simpson and Bowles said in a joint statement. “We have all known for over a year that this fiscal cliff was coming. In fact, Washington politicians set it up to force themselves to seriously deal with our nation’s long-term fiscal problems. Yet even after taking the country to the brink of economic disaster, Washington still could not forge a common-sense bipartisan consensus on a plan that stabilizes the debt.”

President Obama was certainly correct that Americans demonstrated in the last election a desire to increase taxes on the rich. And they displayed support for a strong, if not big, federal government. What they didn’t display was a desire to increase spending, however.

The cliff was falsely portrayed as including major spending cuts, when all it would have done was cut $109 billion from a $3.6-trillion budget in 2013. Does anyone not believe that amount of waste does not exist in federal spending?

While it is true that going over the cliff would have raised almost everyone’s taxes, what the politicians aren’t telling the people is that all taxes eventually will have to be raised if the government continues to spend money at the rate it currently is doing. There simply isn’t enough money to be squeezed out of 2 percent of the population to pay for current programs.

If we want a government that resembles those of Sweden, Norway and France, everyone will have to pay for it, just as those country’s taxpayers do.

In the deal reached this week, truth was perhaps the biggest casualty of all.